I became British because I love this country – other migrants should, too

We must never forget that nations can only exist if the people who live in them accept their ideas, their culture and traditions

Adopting Britain as your home used to be a big deal. Choosing to settle here, if you had been born in another country, was once a long road mined with regulations and restrictions. I should know. I went through the whole process back in the day. Here is the story, for what it’s worth, of my personal journey. Feel free to contrast it with what apparently goes on now.

I arrived here in 1965 from the United States first as an au pair – the only arrangement that seemed to offer the possibility of work plus living accommodation – then proceeded quickly to the status of postgraduate student at the only college of London University (Birkbeck) that would permit me to work while I studied.

This single change of circumstance involved a new visa, the granting of which was complicated by my need to earn a viable living: a situation that in those days of full maintenance grants for students was almost unheard of. But the college authorities were helpful and eventually I got the student visa that meant I could pursue my M.Phil, relying entirely on my own resources.

Along with that one-year conditional permission to stay in the country came something called an Alien’s Registration Card, which I had to produce at my local police station whenever my address changed. There was a clear expectation that the Home Office should be aware of my movements and any change in my living arrangements, even if it was a move from a shared flat to a bed-sitter – a rule with which it would never have occurred to me to argue. But the problem of gaining permission to work remained.

I had no difficulty finding employment. Back then, when university education was still being offered to only a small minority of the British population, people with good degrees were scarce and there were plenty of openings for Englishspeaking graduates. (London was full of Australians as well as Americans taking advantage of this.)

I was able to teach English to foreign students at a language school, and to lecture in what was then called “liberal studies” at a technical college in south-east London. Getting permission from the government to do these things, as compared with simply landing the jobs, was a tortuous business.

The language school and the college where I was to work had to make a case for employing a foreigner by arguing that there was no native applicant suited for the post: that my qualifications and abilities were somehow unique. Implausible as this argument was, the Home Office eventually granted me my work permit and the necessary National Insurance number followed. But there was no question that I had been given anything other than, as it said in my passport, “temporary leave to remain”.

That tenuous position only came to an end after a further two years when I married a British man. As the wife of a UK citizen, I graduated to a visa that was worded more reassuringly: I now had “permanent leave to remain”.

A few years later, I decided to take the final step. There were a number of reasons for becoming a UK citizen (or a “British subject”, as it was then known).

The principal reason was personal: this country had given me the only happiness I had known and I loved it with the kind of fervour that may only be familiar to those who have arrived, at last, in a place where they feel they belong. Then there was the matter of civic participation: I did not wish to be disfranchised for the rest of my life.

To make one’s home in a country without having the right to participate in its democratic process seemed, to someone as politically conscious as I was, to be very unsatisfactory. And, once there was family life to be considered, it was disturbing to be a different nationality from my own children. More than anything, this was a matter of identity: of belonging fully and without reservation to the country I had adopted (and which had, so generously, adopted me.)

So I put in my application for naturalisation and went along, as required, to take my oath of loyalty to the Queen at a local courthouse. As a consequence, the Home Office informed the US State Department of this development and because, at that time, America did not permit dual nationality, my US citizenship was revoked. I was required to relinquish my US passport to the embassy – which was returned to me ceremonially stamped “Cancelled”, and I was issued with an official Certificate of Loss of Nationality.

I had made a definitive, existential decision that was much more than a simple change of location: this was a choice of national identity and a life-changing commitment. I was, quite consciously, agreeing to become a different sort of person from the one that my birthplace would have implied.

Needless to say, this is all offered as a preamble to consideration of the question that now dominates European politics. What does choosing to live in another country mean in today’s world? To my mind then (and now) there is no question that I had decided to become, for almost all intents and purposes, British. The whole point of my decision was that I admired the values and attitudes of this country. Why else choose to live here?

Residing in a country did not seem to me to be simply a matter of adopting a flag of convenience under which it would be possible to live any way one liked, so long as the local circumstances facilitated it. In fact, the old countries of Europe were attractive precisely because they had established cultural histories and an inherited stability that the US – with its constant social churn and neurotic insecurity – lacked. You came to live in Britain because you wanted to be part of what Britain was.

The European Union’s “free movement of people” rule and its obtuse confusion over the assimilation of migrants seem deliberately designed to undermine any such notion of cohesive national identity. You need not choose any more. Your habits and social assumptions need not change. You can have it all: any number of nationalities; a whole wallet file of identity documents; a peripatetic working life that drifts in and out of what would once have been communities but are now simply transit stops in a migratory existence.

Maybe you think this is progress. I can understand the argument which says that it is liberating: a new form of personal freedom. For the young and unattached, this may be – temporarily – true. What bliss to come and go across defunct borders, working and living without encumbrance wherever you please, as if life were a permanent gap-year adventure.

But what happens after that? When the responsibilities of grown-up life cause people to long for rootedness and a real sense of hereditary belonging – what then?

And then there is the more urgent political issue: what will preserve the integrity of a nation’s institutions if the collective memory of its history is lost?

This is the question which France, with its authoritarian arrogance, is trying to grapple with – and Germany, with its horrendous historical baggage, is desperately trying to avoid. When armed French police force a Muslim woman to uncover herself, it looks horribly like the Taliban in reverse.

Bizarrely, this spectacle is conceived as a defence of democratic freedoms. In all this confusion, we are in danger of leaving the defence of the noble idea of nationhood to fascists.